Hi,

I want to thank you for creating this awesome extension for Visual Studio: replacing the Arduino "IDE" with a professional development environment was much needed, even though AVR Studio 6 and Eclipse are viable alternatives, VS is better in my opinion.

My only wish would be to be able to run Visual Micro on platforms other than Windows and if I may, I have a suggestion  for you

I sincerely believe that Linux and Mac users would appreciate your hard work if they could run Visual Micro on their respective OS. I also believe that the Windows audience for Visual Micro would greatly benefit from being able to use a free, OSS development environment such as MonoDevelop: http://monodevelop.com/.

Disclaimer: I'm in no way associated with MonoDevelop or Xamarin. I just appreciate their tools and their ethos.

MonoDevelop works on Windows, Linux and Mac and is a solid alternative to any version of Visual Studio. More importantly, MonoDevelop supports extensions, called add-ins, which would allow porting Visual Micro over: http://monodevelop.com/Developers/Articles/Creating_a_Simple_Add-in

I believe this would immensely broaden the appeal and the market for this already fantastic extension and its essential companion debugger.

Best regards,
-Fabien.

Thanks for the info about Mono addins. I've considered mono a few times but not sure if the plugin stuff was available when I looked.

I agree it would be nice, I'll take a look at it again when I get a mo.

Thanks again for the useful links!

Hi Fabien,

Thanks for the very useful links. I hope we can do something end of this year or early next. It wouldn't be too difficult to implement a slightly less smooth version in Mono quite quickly.

I agree that VS, if you have it, is better than Atmel in many ways however Atmel has some strengths that might help it shine above the rest. We are currently adding increased support in atmel studo allowing hybrid cpp projects with easy access to linked or copied source code from the Arduino core. Hopefully this gives the ability to compile Arduino combined with easier access to the native debug tools that exist in Atmel Studio. A good example if the on-chip debugging that the soon to be released Arduino Zero provides. 

Atmel also understands the Arduino Gcc syntax better than pure microsoft c++ in VS but because the VS intellisense engine is more responsive they both have their strengths in that area.

Zero debugger aside it might be that Mono fits between both camps very well. I'll ping you an email when an early beta is available but don't expect it to be immediate.

Unfortunately Microsoft are dumping the addin system and moving entirely to extensions. It's not an immediate issue but requires a lerge part of the front end (UI) of vm to be re-written. Hopefully the work can be completed at the same time as the mono work pushing as much as possible into standard libs in the same way that we currently have the compiler/build/upload in an isolated non ide dependent manner.

I suspect that for max and linux file names and a few other things will need a little more consideration so if you hear of a developer that knows the various Ide's and is looking for employment please let me know.

Thanks